Amazon just opened its most-automated warehouse yet. But underneath the robotics and artificial-intelligence technology at the site, the facility will still rely on thousands of employees, writes The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 7, 2024). The 3 million-square-foot building in Shreveport, La., is Amazon’s first warehouse to use automation and AI at every step of the fulfillment process and be able to handle one million orders a day.
The facility shows how companies are spreading automation through their distribution centers to get online orders to consumers at an ever faster pace. The sprawling site also demonstrates the challenges Amazon and other companies face as they seek to turn over some of the most physically demanding and repetitive warehouse tasks to robots.
Amazon hired more than 1,400 people at the Shreveport distribution center and plans to eventually employ 2,500 workers picking orders, loading and unloading trucks and managing the robotics systems. The idea is to speed up operations, save on labor costs and make warehouses safer for the workers that remain. Amazon has been the subject of government scrutiny over the treatment of the workers at its facilities. The warehousing sector had one of the highest rates of injuries and illnesses in the U.S., with 4.7 cases recorded per 100 workers compared with the national average of 2.4 cases per 100 workers.
Some traditional warehouse roles have proved too difficult for Amazon to fully automate, however, partly because the company sells more than 400 million widely varied products that range in size, weight and fragility, from dog toys to toaster ovens. Humans can easily look into a storage container packed full of goods, identify a particular item and know how to pick it up and handle it, whether it is a bottle of shampoo or a sweater.
“The tactile grasp that the human hand has, and the situational awareness and the perception of the human brain, is unmatched,” said Amazon’s chief technologist. Instead, robots at the facility carry storage containers full of merchandise to human employees who look inside and pick out the item a customer ordered, then place that item into a tote box that goes onto a conveyor belt and is taken to be packaged.
Classroom discussion questions:
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of automating warehouses?
- Why do warehouses have high injury rates?